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A drafted soldier with less than a month to serve at his detachment at the village of Sertolovo near St. Petersburg died Saturday at the city’s Military Medical Academy from severe head injuries, apparently sustained in a hazing incident. “The recruit was delivered to the hospital’s brain surgery ward in a coma on April 27 and died on Saturday night without regaining consciousness,” said Colonel Yury Klyonov, an aide to the chief military commander of the Leningrad Military District. The recruit was named as Sergei Zavyalov, 23. Zavyalov’s mother, Nadezhda Zavyalova, told St. Petersburg-based human rights group Soldiers’ Mothers that she had learned about her son’s death in a phone call from his detachment. “They told me that Sergei fell and fatally struck his head,” his mother recalls. |
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Alexander Natruskin / Reuters
President Vladimir Putin toasts World War II veterans at the Kremlin on Monday. Russia will mark the anniversary of the end of the war with a national holiday on Wednesday. |
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MOSCOW — The European Union is threatening to block Russia’s bid to join the World Trade Organization unless progress is made on resolving acrimonious disputes between Russia and some of its neighbors before a key summit near Samara next week. While the EU still supports Russia’s accession to the WTO, it will not do so “at any price,” Peter Power, a spokesman for EU Trade Commissioner Peter Mandelson, said Friday.
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MOSCOW — If Alexander Krutov gets his way, foreigners in this country may soon have to pass a Russian language test to qualify for a work permit. “It is the moral obligation of people working in a given country to make an effort to learn its language,” Krutov, a State Duma deputy from the Rodina faction of A Just Russia, said Friday. |
All photos from issue.
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MOSCOW — Federal law enforcement units continue to torture detainees in Chechnya, the Chechen government said, warning of wider social unrest if it continues. Speaking at a government meeting Friday in Grozny, regional lawmaker Ibrahim Khultygov said members of a unit known as ORB-2 routinely abducted relatives of detainees and tortured or used them to pressure the detainees themselves. |
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MOSCOW — Hundreds of students marched to the European Union’s representative office on Friday in the latest protest by pro-Kremlin youth groups over the relocation of a Soviet war monument in Estonia. |
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WASHINGTON — The United States has agreed for U.S. and Russian defense and foreign ministers to meet in an attempt to allay Russian concerns about U.S. missile defense plans in Eastern Europe, a senior U.S. official said Friday. U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Dan Fried said there had been talk of holding so-called 2+2 talks among the four ministers in September or early in the fall, but no date had been set. |
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MOSCOW — A 24-year-old fugitive has been detained in Samara while posing as a U.S. citizen trying to set a world record by crossing Russia without money or identification. |
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MOSCOW — Former Rodina head Dmitry Rogozin and two other nationalist-minded leaders created a new party Saturday that appears to have a good chance of getting into the next State Duma — if it can get registered. The other co-founders of the new party, Great Russia, are Duma Deputy Andrei Savelyev and Alexander Belov, head of the Movement Against Illegal Immigration, which stages boisterous rallies denouncing the presence of dark-skinned foreigners in Russia. |
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 African diplomats joined officials from the Northwest Region and City Hall, and local Russian and African business communities in St Petersburg last week to work out strategies in preparation for Russia’s historic mission to explore trade with the African continent. |
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ST. PETERSBURG — Russia will drastically cut oil product exports via Estonia in the coming month or two, traders said Friday, as the European Commission urged companies to keep to their supply obligations. |
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MOSCOW — A Russian headmaster said on Monday that a court has fined him half his monthly wage for using pirated copies of Microsoft software at his school in a case President Vladimir Putin has called “utter nonsense.” Prosecutors said Alexander Ponosov had violated Microsoft’s property rights by allowing pupils to use 12 computers with unlicensed copies of Microsoft Windows and Office software. |
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MOSCOW — Russia’s state-controlled oil firm Rosneft will face competition from two smaller firms in a major Yukos bankruptcy auction on Thursday but is still the most likely winner, a newspaper said on Monday. |
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MOSCOW, May 7 — Europe’s biggest bank HSBC has received a licence for its Russian subsidiary allowing it to take deposits from retail clients, the central bank said on Monday. HSBC already has a growing corporate and investment banking business in Russia and an office there, but obtaining the licence is a key step towards becoming the first British lender to build a retail presence in Russia. |
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TEHRAN, Iran — Gazprom is interested in taking part in building and managing a proposed $7 billion gas pipeline from Iran to India via Pakistan, a company official said Saturday. |
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MOSCOW — Slovakian Prime Minister Robert Fico on Friday asked senior Russian officials for help in resolving the fate of Yukos’ 49 percent stake in Slovakian pipeline operator Transpetrol. The sale of the stake to Transpetrol is the subject of legal wrangling among Yukos creditors, including those linked to the Russian state and to Yukos’ former majority shareholder, GML. |
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MOSCOW — Pharmstandard, the drug maker part-owned by Roman Abramovich’s Millhouse Capital, has raised $880 million in an initial public offering that the company said Friday valued it at $2. |
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A Moscow court on Friday declared that a police raid of PricewaterhouseCoopers’ audit office was illegal. The Tverskoi District Court said the search by Interior Ministry investigators had not been sanctioned by a court warrant. The court ordered the authorities to rectify the violations. |
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One of the most popular and fast developing areas of today’s telecommunications market is broadband access to the Internet using Ethernet technology, which, for residential subscribers, is promoted as a home network. |
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 Even by late Sunday, conservative candidate Nicolas Sarkozy looked to be on his way to winning the French presidential election. Although belonging to President Jacques Chirac’s party, Sarkozy might adopt a different approach to foreign affairs. Contrary to a 50-year Gaullist tradition of strategic autonomy from the United States, he made significant moves toward a trans-Atlantic approach. |
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PARIS — Cecilia Sarkozy, whose husband Nicolas was elected Sunday as France’s new president, is a fiercely independent former model and PR executive unlikely to fit easily into the discreet role of first lady. “I don’t see myself as a first lady. It bores me. I prefer going round in combat trousers and cowboy boots. I don’t fit the mould,” the elegant 49-year-old brunette has said. Her arrival at the Elysee will certainly send in a blast of modernity after 12 years of the Chiracs, whose bourgeois respectability sat well with the Louis XV furniture of the 18th century palace. Like the defeated Socialist candidate Segolene Royal, Cecilia and her husband are in a relationship that flies in the face of presidential convention but which in many ways reflects the changing sociology of France. |
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 PARIS — French president-elect Nicolas Sarkozy plans to waste no time pushing through a weighty package of pro-market, anti-crime reforms — but the first battle is winning a majority in parliament in new elections next month. |
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WASHINGTON — U.S. President George W. Bush was due to welcome Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II and her husband to the White House on Monday in what was set to become the first formal British royal visit with a U.S. leader in 16 years. The monarch and Prince Philip were due to be greeted on the south lawn of the White House with a 21-gun salute and the national anthems of the two countries. |
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 MOSCOW — Unbeaten Canada needed an overtime goal to edge the Czech Republic 4-3 and defending champions Sweden shut out Finland 1-0 to maintain its 100 percent record at the world ice hockey championship on Sunday. Russia overpowered Switzerland 6-3 for its fifth straight victory while Slovakia beat Belarus 4-3 to reach the quarter-finals. |
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